Hi All,

Conditions up here wild and windy, My inoculated Bella Italiano have just shown through. No sign of growth from the non-inoculated cloves as yet, but this is in keeping with growth pattern shown last year with my Vayo cloves.

It would seem that the VAM's are already attaching themselves to the now forming roots of the inoculated cloves. As I remember from last year it was about a week earlier that I saw the first signs of growth. However since this a different garlic, I will just note the event.

We had a delivery of cattle manure from the park farm, as fortune would have it I was the only person at the allotments at the time. I was able to get 8 barrow loads of the best that was going, this involved digging past all the hay to get to the real manure.

I have covered the pile with heavy duty black plastic sheeting, and have now started a litre container of EM's.
This should be ready in 5 or 6 days, once I see the airlock plopping for a couple of days it will be time to use it.

This I will water onto the manure pile using a watering can, then re-cover the manure and weigh down with bricks and leave until spring.

This I believe will give the EM's sufficient time to work their way through the pile removing most of any nasty bacteria, fungi, hormones and the like.

I just feel safer using EM's on manure, whereby they can work their magic from November until March.

5 months of EM action on this heap will I believe reduce much of any infestation within the heap. EM's are well capable of working at temperatures of -30 deg C so don't let winter temperatures put you off using this method to cleanse manure.

These are just my thoughts, others will disagree


the mind is like a parachute its totally useless unless its open